The Oral Talmud: Episode 7 - No More Gatekeeping (Berakhot 28a - Part 1)
SHOW NOTES
“There are barriers being put up that say ‘You’re not a good Jew if you don’t do it our way’ – but as soon as those barriers come down, there’s actually a huge interest! And then the question is: What do you do with that engagement? What does that involvement produce?” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
This week and next we’ll be discussing another essential Talmud narrative: the conflict between the early sages Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua, and more specifically the changes the yeshiva went through after Rabban Gamliel was deposed. What was going on at the time of the later Talmud authors that they wrote this story about their predecessors? Where do we see these dynamics around changes in leadership and access to learning today? What happens when we open the doors?
This week’s text: The Removal of Rabban Gamliel, Adding 700 Benches (Berakhot 28a)
Access the full Sefaria Source Sheet with additional show notes via this link. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com/donate.
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Dan Libenson: Hi everybody. This is Dan Libenson, and I am here with another episode of The Oral Talmud with Benay Lappe. Hey, Benay.
Benay Lappe: Hey hey!
Dan Libenson: And we are really excited to dive into a really important story that’s meaningful to both of us, I think for the same reasons, for different reasons. It’s a story that I think we both initially think of as a short story, and it turns out that there are layers upon layers, as should not surprise anybody. So we’re excited to jump into it. Just to remind folks, this is our episode where Benay and I go over a text from the Talmud that we think is really significant, and particularly significant to the times in which we live, which are not only the COVID times, but just the general bigger picture times of the last 200 years, whatever, since the crumble, as you say, Benay, that might have preceded the crash that we may now be experiencing. So there’s a lot to dig into there.
And every other week or so we have a scholar that joins us, a professor, a Talmud teacher, somebody who we really admire from the world of Talmud. We’re working on our next guest. We hope that we know who it is, but we’ll keep you posted there.
So the text that we want to jump into today is from the tractate Brachot, which I don’t know, Benay, if you know how this–this is thought of as the first tractate in the Talmud, in the sense that it’s traditionally the first one that people study. But I don’t know, is it right to think about the Talmud in any way as really having a beginning?
Benay Lappe: I don’t think so. Every single page of Talmud, including the very first page of Brachot, which, as you say, is usually volume alef on your shelf, and the first one you start with in a daf yomi cycle… every single page presumes you already know every other page. So I don’t really think there’s a beginning or an end.
Dan Libenson: For what it’s worth, this is page 28a, although the part, the backstory kind of starts at 27b. Just to remind people who don’t know that the Talmud counts pages by folios, meaning both sides of the page are counted as page 28. And so there’s side a and side b. So this is pretty early on. If somebody does start studying the Talmud traditionally, this is relatively early on. And what’s interesting to me is I wonder what is made of it in some of the more traditional circles, or maybe they just skip it over, because there’s certainly radical potential in this text that will be fun to explore.
Benay Lappe: As you mention radical potential, as I check in with my more “traditionally trained” rabbinic colleagues, and I ask them, “What do you make of this?! How can you possibly read this story without the radical?” Or this story, or that story, pretty much every story in the Talmud, or every passage. I think that the fault line is that, in some communities, the radical is acknowledged, but it’s like, “Oh, they can do that, but we can’t.” And I think the difference between, as far as SVARA goes, or my philosophy goes, the us and them is, “Yeah, look at the radical, and they meant us to receive that story so that we would do that as well.’ It’s a large issue of trust of one generation to the next. But I digress.
Dan Libenson: Yeah. There’s certainly a lot to unpack here. Let’s jump into it. Just to give a little bit of background on some of the characters here, these are characters that we’ve talked about before. I don’t know that we completely did this intentionally, but there is this group of characters…. Later, and maybe at another time, I want to actually start to explore them as the knights of the round table of the Talmud, because they’re kind of this particular cast of characters that are this recurring cast that a lot of stories are about. There are stories about other, later characters, but this is kind of the crew. This is the people that are really remembered. And I don’t know if that’s because they were in the early days, or because they were in that chaotic middle period. And by the way, I think so. Those are the times that people remember, the wilderness in the Torah and the Yavne period in the Talmud. And it’s interesting to think about these particular characters. But the main stars of this show are Rabban Gamliel, who is the kind of head rabbi of these early days of-
Benay Lappe: He’s the president. You’re right, these are, they’re like the Brat Pack of the rabbis.
Dan Libenson: But also kind of, like you say, the cabinet. He’s the president.
Benay Lappe: He is the president! They call him president. You have to wonder, I don’t know. I love their chutzpah at giving themselves and each other titles that are so important. But anyway, yeah, they called him nasi, which means president.
Dan Libenson: In modern Hebrew it means president. At that time, I think it had more of a valence of a prince, which may be the same concept. It’s actually really hard to translate. I translated, as we talked about before, I translated the novel by Yochi Brandes, an Israeli novelist, called The Orchard. In Hebrew, The Orchard of Rabbi Akiva. And actually it was really hard to translate this term nasi. Because if you translate it as prince, the English reader would be like, “There was a prince? Who was the king?!” And if you translate it as president, that sounded too contemporary. Eventually… and initially I translated it as leader, but then it didn’t work, because there were some things that happened later where you actually had to have the word nasi. So eventually I think I translated it, explained it the first time as leader, and then the rest of the time just didn’t translate it.
Benay Lappe: You just left it nasi.
Dan Libenson: Just had it as the name of an office, nasi. So he’s the head guy. And this is a story about that time when he was impeached and removed from office. He wasn’t, he didn’t apparently have Jay Sekulow and various, and Mitch McConnell on his side. That’s an interesting point in and of itself–where was his Mitch McConnell? Why was he removed? Maybe we can get into some of that. But there’s him, and then there’s this-
Benay Lappe: You know, wait, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but now that I think about it, if we remember the story that we told a couple weeks ago, the oven of Achnai story, he and Rabi Yehoshua are on the same team. And as we’re about to see, they end up on different teams. Maybe he had–maybe Rabi Yehoshua was his Mitch McConnell, and he jumped parties. I don’t know.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, something like that. I don’t know, is there a way… this is going to–maybe–if somebody out there knows this, or if you know it, Benay… even a sensible question. Is there a way to know whether the oven of Achnai story happens before this or after this?
Benay Lappe: I think it has to happen after this. Because as we know, the end of the oven of Achnai story, Rabban Gamliel dies. So-
Dan Libenson: Oh, right.
Benay Lappe: Right?
Dan Libenson: Right. Okay, so in that case, what’s interesting is to imagine that maybe this story is when Rabban Gamliel switches teams, because in the earlier story–in the beginning of this story, he’s kind of against Rabi Yehoshua, but by the oven of Achnai story, he’s on Rabbi Yehoshua’s team. So maybe this is really that switch.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, I would see it the other way. I would see it that Rabi Yehoshua joins Rabban Gamliel’s team. Rabban Gamliel, he’s the head guy, and I think once this episode of today’s story is over, Rabi Yehoshua and he make peace again and are on the same side.
Dan Libenson: Okay. Well this will actually be something interesting to track, which neither of us I think was quite…. It’s interesting how these conversations go. This isn’t where we were planning to go. But as we talk it through, I’m like, “Wait a second, this is an important question.” Because-
Benay Lappe: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it either.
Dan Libenson: This is actually a turning point. And I don’t know who–it’s an interesting question who switches to whose team, and how does that matter, and what does that mean. I would say, just as a starting point, that in this period Rabban Gamliel is–he’s a more conservative guy. He comes from the family of Hillel, which is on the one hand a more progressive strain of Judaism, but he’s kind of a tough guy. He seems more conservative in his orientation. And Rabbi Eliezer is the more conservative of the Rabbi Eliezer versus Rabbi Yehoshua rivalry.
So it kind of makes sense in a way, and it makes more sense to imagine Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer being on the same team. So the idea that Rabban Gamliel switches to the more progressive side is… the reason I raise it is because I think it potentially has valences for our time. Can we imagine the guy that’s more like Rabban Gamliel in the world? I don’t know who that would be today, I mean, in the Jewish world. Kind of having a wake-up moment, and saying, “You know what, we actually really are at a bigger transformation than I thought, and maybe I should team up with the more progressives.” Maybe I just-
Benay Lappe: Exactly. I think that’s the moment. We should come back to that.
Dan Libenson: Okay. Basically, this is the story of the time that Rabban Gamliel was removed. And he was removed because he had a fight with Rabbi Yehoshua. I want to jump into the text, but I also want to make sure that people have some context. So let’s just quickly talk about a little bit of the context, which we can find on page 27b of the tractate Brachot. Which is basically just describing why was he removed–what was his crime? What was his corruption? What did he do to deserve being thrown out?
Benay Lappe: The articles of impeachment.
Dan Libenson: Right, the articles of impeachment. And basically the articles of impeachment were that he was–I mean, the most obvious from the story here that he was mean to Rabbi Joshua. By the way, one should note that that was actually, when James Comey was fired, that was what the excuse for getting rid of him was, was that he had been mean to Hilary Clinton. Which is obviously a pretext, and maybe that’s a pretext here too. But the pretextual reason for getting rid of him, at least, is that he was mean to Rabbi Joshua. You want to say more?
Benay Lappe: Yeah. This last story is the last in a series of at least three episodes with Rabi Yehoshua, with the same guy, where he was… at least the rabbis understand him to have been unnecessarily cruel, shaming, demeaning. There’s the famous story where Rabi Yehoshua and Rabban Gamliel disagree about how the calendar is calculated, and based on their different calculations, Rabi Yehoshua ends up with Yom Kippur being on day x, and Rabban Gamliel ends up with Yom Kippur being the next day or the day before. I forget the exact details. And Rabban Gamliel says to him, “Okay, Yom Kippur is going to not only be on the day that I say it is, but because you are publicly disputing with me, I command you to come to me carrying your staff and a bag of money… and a cheeseburger…”
Dan Libenson: Right. I command you to violate Yom Kippur.
Benay Lappe: Exactly. On the day that you think Yom Kippur is. So did he really need to do that? And Rabi Yehoshua eventually does it. But there’s this kind of overbearing, authoritative, demeaning cruelty. I mean, real cruelty. And this story that you’re about to describe is the last of a series of these episodes with Rabi Yehoshua.
Dan Libenson: And what was the other one, the second one?
Benay Lappe: Oh, I don’t remember the details of it to be honest.
Dan Libenson: So it’s not only that they had a dispute. It’s that Rabban Gamliel is extremely cruel to Rabbi Yehoshua, who is apparently a beloved person in the community. And instead of just having a dispute and saying, “I’m right, you’re wrong. I’m the president, I decide, whatever, I’m the decider.” Instead, he’s needlessly cruel to him. So instead of just saying, “I’m deciding, and it’s going to be this way,” he forces him to come on Yom Kippur to violate the day that he thinks is Yom Kippur. And here, in this case, they’re having a dispute about basically what time to say the prayers, the morning prayers.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, I think it’s the evening prayers, but regardless.
Dan Libenson: Evening prayers.
Benay Lappe: Yep.
Dan Libenson: You know, it’s a–it’s important, but it’s just one of many disputes that they have. And he basically forces Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Yehoshua, to stand up, and he doesn’t let him sit down again. And people think that’s really treating him disrespectfully and unnecessarily cruelly.
I’ll just note one thing about the previous, that other story, because it’s referred to here. The people say, “Why does he have to be torturing Rabbi Joshua just like he did last Rosh Hashanah?” Which basically means the story that you’re referring to. And the really interesting piece–and I think there’s a direct tie to the story that we’ve been discussing the last couple of times, the oven of Achnai story–where Rabbi Akiva basically helps Rabbi Joshua feel okay, ultimately, about the fact that he’s going to be violating what he thinks is Yom Kippur. And he reads him a verse from the bible. Actually, I think it’s from the most recently weekly Torah portion that we studied. I should have looked it up exactly. But I’m pretty sure that we just studied, I mean, we just read in the synagogue Parashat Emor, and at the end there is where they’re talking about all the holidays. And I think it’s from there. And basically there’s this line that says, basically, the basic translation is, “These are the holidays that I ordain for you to observe.” But there’s a way of reading it where it, the word otam, which means them, referring to the holidays, can be read with different vowels as atem, meaning you. and there’s a way, Rabbi Akiva is doing a kind of homiletic reading here, saying to Rabbi Joshua, “Don’t worry, God Godself said that you declare the days of the holidays.” So if it turns out that Rabban Gamliel is wrong, it’s still back to that majority rules idea. There’s this thing in the Torah that says majority rules. “Don’t worry about it. You declare the days of the holidays.” And it doesn’t really say that in the Torah. It's another example of one of these knowing, intentional misquotation-winks that has the effect of saying, “Hey, we can actually overrule the Torah. We can overrule the word of God based on a double–we can double overrule it because we’re overruling it using a misquotation to justify the overruling.” And that’s how this game is played.
And I guess Rabbi Joshua is like, “I guess that’s how this game is played. It’s fine.” I don’t think he’s thrilled about it, but he’s able to reconcile the situation. And that’s just, part of the backstory of this is that it’s in light of, it’s kind of reminding us of those stories. And like you say, actually, in the studying process, both that story of Rabbi Akiva and Yom Kippur comes much later in the tractate of Rosh Hashanah. And the story of the oven of Achnai is in Bava Metzia, much later. So it does rely, like you say, that you know these stories, even though in theory this is the first book that you’re studying.
Benay Lappe: Interestingly, you’re bringing up the way Rabi Akiva misreads Torah to Rabi Yehoshua to comfort him and get him to go along with this whole Rabban Gamliel abuse. And we then find in the story of the oven of Achnai that Rabi Yehoshua is doing the same kind of midrashic misreading to God. Not that that was unusual–that was, this was Rabi Akiva’s approach to Torah. And basically the Talmud becomes an Akivan document, the tradition becomes an Akivan tradition, one in which that’s the way we do it, and we now believe in a God who’s okay with us getting it wrong as long as we take the responsibility for deciding how things should go.
Dan Libenson: So just to set the scene here on page 27b, we’re getting the sense… so basically what’s going on here is that Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Joshua have just had a dispute. Rabban Gamliel says, “Get up on your feet,” and goes on with his lecture, and never tells him to sit back down. And then the people–the other students-
Benay Lappe: It’s like you tell someone to stand up in the corner, like a punished ten-year-old.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, and then the other people in the room, the Talmud says they started to murmur, and they told Chutzpit–in this translation, Chutzpit the disseminator–he’s kind of the guy, he’s the amplification system. Rabban Gamliel gives his lecture, and then it’s like we’ve seen this from the Middle Ages, the king speaks and then somebody repeats his words louder so that people can hear it in the back of the room. So that’s the way this thing is going, and they tell that guy to stop. They basically turn off–essentially, they turn of Rabban Gamliel’s mic. That’s the first thing–insurrection. This is a bottom-up insurrection. The people say, “We’re not going to let you do that,” to Rabban Gamliel, “to Rabbi Joshua.” And then they basically get together and say, “How long is this going to go on? Let’s get rid of him.” But before they get rid of him, they say, “Well, wait a second, before we get rid of him we got to appoint somebody else.”
And I don’t know if you really want to get into that. They raise a variety of candidates, including Rabbi Akiva, and they say, “No, we can’t have Rabbi Akiva, for example, because he doesn’t come from a prominent enough family.” Specifically, his family are converts. He doesn’t have the kind of, as we say in Yiddish, yichus, the status to be able to take a position like that, even though he’s the most brilliant of the rabbis. And so they end up appointing a much younger man, a very young man whose hair isn’t even white, and so there’s–Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah. And he has to have a miraculous situation where his hair turns white in order to be able to take the position. So they’d rather have a young man who descends from Ezra the scribe, one of the great leaders of Israel. They’d rather have someone with status than someone who’s the most brilliant of them.
Benay Lappe: Right. And let’s remember he’s not only a young man–he’s eighteen years old. I mean, this is a kid, a teenager. And I wondered myself how much that makes him on the queer fringes, or… they had to know that he was going to have new ideas. They had to know he was going to bring a new perspective. He was not from the old guard, in the sense of his age. Just because of his age. So there may be something there, in terms of what we know his first act was. So that’s where we jumped into our story.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, I think that that’s going to be a question. Did they know… it sort of feels like one of those cases where they put a new pope in, for some reason, and think that it’s just going to caretaker, whatever, maybe John XXIII. And then he upends the whole system. Did they know that that was going to happen, or did they just miscalculate? What’s going on there?
Benay Lappe: I don’t know. Nobody knows. My guess is they knew exactly what they were doing, and they wanted the kind of opening up that we’re about to see happen. I think so. because this–just as the tanur shel Achnai, the oven of Achnai story represented a kind of snapshot of the shift between us following prophecy and disregarding God’s prophecy and saying we’re going to decide, I think this story marks the shift between one way of determining truth and a new way. And the old way is yeah, there’s debate, okay, there for sure was debate in Rabban Gamliel’s academy, but at the end of the day, what the nasi said went. He had the right to determine how things were going to go. And that ends at this moment. And now there’s a kind of infinite radical uncertainty that they adopt. Okay, let’s see how that happens.
Dan Libenson: I should note, by the way, for folks that were–we were intending this as a two-part series, so don’t worry that we’re not-
Benay Lappe: That we haven’t started.
Dan Libenson: -making rapid progress here. We have, there’s a lot of material here, and we’re going to cover it in two sessions.
Just one last note, because I didn’t know this when we were talking before the show. One of the interesting things is that Elazar ben Azariah, when he’s nominated, he goes and asks his wife if it’s okay, which seemed to me like a kind of nice thing to do, but you explained that there was more to it than that.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. So when they ask him to be the new nasi, the new head, president, whatever, he goes and asks his wife. And the reason he asks his wife is not that he’s just a nice guy. There’s really a Jewish legal reason behind it, and that is that if he shifts his occupation from being a student to being the nasi, he shifts his, the halachic category with regard to how much sexual, the frequency of sexual satisfaction he’s obliged to provide for his wife. He has to ask her, because her right to sex x number of times per week is determined by his occupation, and she had to agree to that when she agreed to marry him. “Oh, I’m marrying a camel driver. Okay, I know I’m going to get it this often. Oh, I’m married to a day worker, okay, this often. Yeah, I’m going to marry this guy.” And she thought she was marrying just a scholar, and now she’s going to instantly be married to someone who’s going to be less obligated to provide her with sex, so he needs her permission, because she has to agree to reduce her sexual access.
Dan Libenson: She doesn’t seem to have a huge problem with it. Maybe it’s because his hair turned white and he wasn’t quite as sexy as he used to be.
Benay Lappe: There’s actually more to that backstory as well, which the text does bring in. and she says to him, “I don’t think you should do this, because you may get kicked out just the way Rabban Gamliel got kicked out. This could bring you a lot of tzures and heartache.” And he says, he repeats this line that apparently was a common line, like, “Here today, gone tomorrow,” that it must have been something like that, which is you drink out of a glass goblet–which was very rare and valuable–you drink out of your glass goblet today even though it might break tomorrow. He says, “Yeah, okay, I’m going to drink out of that glass goblet now. Whatever happens tomorrow will happen tomorrow.”
Dan Libenson: And just to note that at the very end there there’s that line that we know from the Haggadah where Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah says, “I am as a man of seventy years old.” Instead of saying, “I am seventy years old,” he says, “I am like a man of seventy years old,” because he actually was eighteen, but he was made–this miraculous thing happened to make him look old so he could have the status.
By the way, not to talk about now, I think, but it’s really interesting that they’re still concerned about this idea of status and appearances, even though we kind of admire these folks as the progressive, the new people. I don’t know. I’m curious how that lands in our world. I kind of tend to get annoyed a little bit that people want to hear something from a rabbi these days, even though they don’t really even care about rabbis, but they feel it’s more legitimate when it comes from a rabbi. It’s almost like if somebody is just some regular person and they can get somebody to give them rabbinical ordination, and then they can all of a sudden say, “I’m a rabbi,” people will somehow be satisfied by that, even though they were the same person they were yesterday.
So here too, it feels like this is all fake. Either he’s a good leader or he’s not a good leader. Are these appearances really where we should be focused?
Benay Lappe: You know, the rabbis talk about that a lot. They talk about the role of appearance in one’s ability to serve on the Sanhedrin. There’s a famous passage over in Sanhedrin where Rabi Yochanan, who was famously gorgeous, says one of the requirements for serving on the Sanhedrin is to be beautiful, is to be good-looking. And I think he was talking about the JFK effect. The idea that… and Rashi clarifies. Yeah, if you’re good-looking–and this is super problematic, let me just say that. That’s his claim, that if you’re good-looking, people will respect you and listen to you and you’ll be able to instill a sense of awe and honor. Rabi Elazar has this transformation that gives him the appearance that will grant him the respect, which is odd, but…
Dan Libenson: We’ll come back to that, too. By the way, just so people know–classically, Rabbi Joshua is not good-looking, and that’s just something to note.
Let’s jump into the actual text that’s the real first major focus of today, and we’ll start doing our thing where we read and you stop me and we discuss.
Benay Lappe: Read slowly, because every line of this story is amazing and there’s so much there. Okay, so let’s go slow.
Dan Libenson: Okay, so it starts on, again, Brachot 28a, towards, close to the top. It was taught. On that day, meaning the day that Rabban Gamliel was deposed and Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah was appointed instead of him, they dismissed the guard at the door, and permission was granted for the students to enter.
Benay Lappe: Okay, great. I wanted to stop you mid-sentence. Okay. First of all, what is a guard doing at the door? Let’s first notice that there are bouncers at the doors to the beit midrash. There are bouncers at the yeshiva door, guards. That’s interesting.
Dan Libenson: It’s really interesting.
Benay Lappe: First of all, the fact that there are doors itself is interesting. Because probably in the era of Rabban Gamliel, there wasn’t an institutionalized academy the way we imagine a yeshiva with doors. They were probably gathering under a tree or in somebody’s yard, and this whole imagination of the academy in this era was probably a retrojection from the era when the editors of the Talmud did have institutionalized yeshivot, and they’re probably retrojecting this whole structure of the yeshiva back into Rabban Gamliel’s time.
Dan Libenson: Right. But wait, I want to really emphasize that only in–I think I mentioned this maybe in a previous episode, but I really want to start thinking about this idea. I’m making the analogy to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. That there actually was a historical–or literary scholars think there actually was a historic Arthur. He wasn’t the king of the United Kingdom of England, and he wasn’t from the Middle Ages. He was probably some tribal chieftain type of person long, long before the Middle Ages. And there were these stories about him and what an amazing person he was and all of that. And then subsequent, every generation would retell the story of Arthur, and once there started to be kings of England, Britain, whatever, then he became a king. And then he started to get Knights of the Round Table, and then these knights initially, maybe they had some kind of historical connection to different parts of Britain that were coming together, but then over time they started to get a character. So Lancelot is the gallant one, and whatever.
And so when we look at the stories of Arthur, we’re actually seeing layer upon layer. You can excavate and do archelogy on the story itself and learn things. So the setting in the world of the Middle Ages with knights and shields and horses, that tells us more about the people writing in the Middle Ages than it tells us about Arthur. Yet there are also things that we can dig into the story and try to find some of the real deeper nuggets that kind of have the sense of ancient wisdom. And those may well be the most ancient things. And so it’s really interesting to note that probably maybe there was some issue going on at the time that this story was composed, much later, that had to do with who was going to be allowed to study in the yeshiva.
Benay Lappe: That’s right.
Dan Libenson: It’s like if Harvard’s talking about should we expand our class size, they might say, “Well, back in the day, in the early days of Harvard, they actually had this conversation, and they decided not to expand it.”
Benay Lappe: That’s right!
Dan Libenson: And that story was kind of true. Something like that happened. That’s one of the pieces that’s going on here.
I think it’s actually valuable to always be thinking at least at two different time scales. One, what do we think might have been going on in those early days after the Temple was destroyed? And the other, what’s happening some hundreds of years later that might have been an active issue that they are, like we do in the Supreme Court today, trying to find some originalist argument that strengthens their hand?
Benay Lappe: That’s right. That’s right. So this really is a story of five hundred years later, somewhere in the fifth, sixth century, that is being set. It’s a struggle that’s being fought out with a story being set five hundred years prior, during the era of the Rat Pack, or the era of the greats, or the original.
Dan Libenson: Yeah. By the way, it’s a little hard–sorry I keep interrupting you now.
Benay Lappe: No, go ahead.
Dan Libenson: It’s a little hard to even struggle with that part of it. So far we’ve talked to two historians of the Talmud, and it’s really hard to get a good read on what was happening at that later time, or especially that middle time of the composition of the Talmud. Maybe the fourth century, the fifth century. It’s hard to quite wrap my mind around what life was like then and what people might have been trying to get at. And it really, I think it’s kind of important if it’s possible to discover that. Because I’m thinking today, Harvard may well be thinking about expanding its class size, because in the COVID period all of a sudden now we’re seeing that we can have online education, and that it can really be effective, and whatever. Harvard might say, “Hey, why not expand our class size five times as big? We’ll get more money, we’ll outcompete some of these other schools,” and whatever. That question about that story of back in 1636 there was an attempt, that that really is a live issue, but it’s a live issue for a very particular reason, which we’ve just gone through this pandemic. So it really makes me wonder, what happened in the year 400 that was making some issue happening? And maybe that matters in a way that it feels like we don’t know, I don’t know enough about that time.
Benay Lappe: Critical Talmud scholarship is now almost completely focused on that question. The layer of the stama, which has only been in our own lifetimes discovered or identified.
Dan Libenson: Okay, are we ready to go back to the text?
Benay Lappe: One final thing. I think a lot about rabbinic education, and this story is a very personal one for me, because in order for me to go to rabbinical school, there were guards at the doors, essentially, that said you have to be straight, you have to pass the straight test. And I snuck around the guards at the door. And rabbinic education still, even though every rabbinical school in the liberal world accepts LGBTQ students, there are all sorts of other test, and litmus tests, and requirements beyond how much Hebrew you know, that have to do with your politics and what you think about Israel and whether you’re willing to go there or not, and who you’re dating and who you’re married to. There are all sorts of guards still at the door, and I think it’s a very live question for rabbis today. Who’s being let in to the academy?
Dan Libenson: Absolutely. And one other point to make about that is this is set–at least it’s set in the early days of rabbinic education. Before that, there might have been, imagine a priest school. To become a priest was not a matter of education, but you can imagine maybe there were, the superstar priest could learn to do the sacrifices and things, the other priests were kind of helpers, whatever. To get into higher priest school, you had to have certain criteria. And we know from the Torah that some of those involved things like sexual orientation, not that that was a criterion of the priest, but things like your body had to be a certain way. And there were certain criteria about how your body was to know whether you could really be a functioning priest.
And so here was the setting up of a post-priest school. It happened to be called the rabbinical school–now we would call it a rabbinical school. But in a way it’s the analogy to, in our time, if we would imagine a post-rabbinical school. This is the school that’s training the next type of leader. And one of the questions is are we going to make the same mistakes that the previous kind made. Maybe we’re just starting to see that rabbinical schools are starting, for example, to–or started some years ago to–many, not all rabbinical schools, of course, but many at least liberal Judaism rabbinical schools admit people without regard to sexual orientation, for example. That’s wonderful.
As we set up a post-rabbinical school, let’s say, is that the starting point? We just want to–certainly we don’t want to backtrack. But no, shouldn’t we blow it even further and say there’s all these categories that you still can’t get into rabbinical school. In the post-rabbinical school, for sure, which of those are going to be wiped away? And that’s what’s going on here.
Benay Lappe: Absolutely. And besides the LGBTQ, Israel, Zionism, intermarriage issue, it’s well-known that the dean who accepted me and my classmates in my era who, I don’t want to use the word “deposed,” but who left, the next dean, everyone said those people who were accepted before would never have been accepted. Not because we were queer or this and that, but because we were seekers. We were people who, we were newly observant. The first day of rabbinical school was the first day we kept kosher or kept Shabbos, for many of us. And we were trying things out, we were seekers. And once this dean left, the new dean put new guards at the door, and you had to be, already have had a long track of being observant. You had to already be there. And it was a very….
This is going on right now. One of the questions is what’s the purpose of the academy. Is it professional school? Is it a formative… okay. We’ll get into the story.
Dan Libenson: Let’s go on. By the way, anybody who thinks we’re going at this too slowly, I just want to tell them that this is the fast version.
Benay Lappe: Okay, so where are we? So there are guards at the door, and the first act of Rabi Elazar ben Azariah as the new head is to fire the guards at the door, right?
Dan Libenson: Right. And then the Talmud explains because Rabban Gamliel, the previous-
Benay Lappe: Wait, I’m sorry. I just want to get to the second half of that sentence. The guards are fired and permission is given to anyone who wants to learn. Okay, so all of a sudden there are no criteria, no “guards at the door.”
Dan Libenson: Right, no admissions requirements.
Benay Lappe: No admissions requirement. The only thing you have to do is to want to learn. That’s it. Anyone who wants to learn can now come and learn. That’s cool! I mean, that’s really, that’s interesting. Okay, go head.
Dan Libenson: Then it explains what the previous admissions requirements had been, because it says–because Rabban Gamliel would proclaim and say, “Any student whose inside is not like his outside will not enter the study hall.”
Benay Lappe: Okay, let’s-
Dan Libenson: So I don’t think we have to get into that too deeply, but what does that mean? What are those admission requirements?
Benay Lappe: Yeah. So this line always vexes me. I’m not sure what to do with it. On its face, it looks like a really reasonable requirement. It seems nice. Your insides have to be like your outsides. It seems to mean something like you have to have a kind of integrity. Who you are as a person has to match the way you walk through the world. You have to manifest who you really are. There can’t be a discrepancy or disparity between who you purport to be and who people think you are and who you really are. That seems like a good thing. Or is it a bad thing? Is it that we’re going to judge who you really are based on your manners, or your demeanor? Is it a classist overlay where people are being misjudged as to what’s inside?
Dan Libenson: The part that appeals to me about it, I think…. I think about, let’s say, classically in the Ivy League, maybe today still, to some extent–certainly fifty years ago–there was this notion of these Brahmin families who looked really like the Kennedys and looked really great and were good at rowing crew, but they might not have been very smart or very nice or thoughtful. And part of me feels like Rabban Gamliel’s saying those people wouldn’t get into my yeshiva, to my school, because their inside is rotten, or insufficient, at least, and their outside is maybe beautiful. So that’s a good thing.
But then it feels to me like the bad thing is that there are all these people, like, for example, Rabbi Joshua, who might be so wonderful on the inside but not good-looking, or somehow otherwise impressive on the outside. Rabbi Akiva, I don’t know, we know some about his looks from the Talmud, but we don’t necessarily, we know that the way his outside was problematic is that he didn’t have the pedigree, the status. Now, they got in. However they got in, whatever. But it seems like the most, a lot of people wouldn’t get in that are kind of, “Oh, that person is a simpleton, a farmer, a dirty, doesn’t shower, doesn’t smell good,” whatever that might be. Even though they might be a brilliant person. That’s what always struck me as the problematic part of that way of thinking.
Benay Lappe: Or is the problematic part that, who do these guards think they are to be able to ascertain whether someone’s insides match their outsides? Is it the hubris and the obvious inability and inaccuracy of such a test? Is it the fact that there’s a test at all? Is it a bad test? I’m not sure. And I don’t know what to make of this, but having done a little research on this sugya as well, this statement that is put into the mouth of Rabban Gamliel, the test that one’s insides should be like one’s outsides, was a much later utterance by Rava, one of our heroes. And in the Palestinian version of this story, this line doesn’t appear at all. So I’m not sure what it adds to the story to put this here. It seems like the original story didn’t name the criterion at all, just that there were guards at the door. I’m not sure what to make of that.
Dan Libenson: Rava supposedly, that was his position, or he was against that position?
Benay Lappe: No, Rava believed that. Rava said a bunch of things about what it looks like to be a good student of Torah, what’s the right way to learn. But not that he used these as criteria for admissions or for…. So this slogan that he had is put into the mouth of Rabban Gamliel as a test.
Dan Libenson: I think we should, as you say, put a sticky on this question, but it would be interesting if in some ways this is actually a story of Rava’s yeshiva, and that maybe Rava did have that test, and eventually came to see that it wasn’t right to have it as a test. That would be a kind of interesting little story.
But the one thing that I wanted to add about the specific criteria–maybe I have college admissions on the mind because I have a high school junior. But when you hear college admissions officers, they often will say something like, “I could admit a completely different class of 2,000 people or 1,500 people, and it would be equally good.” And they’re saying that as kind of, “Oh, you shouldn’t feel so bad if you weren’t admitted, because there’s some randomness in the system.” But what happens is that the kid who wasn’t admitted is really sad and devastated. I’m not sure that that’s such a comforting type of thing.
What I’m feeling a little bit is why not admit all the people that you could admit, that would be suitable for your school? And then they’ll say, “But we don’t have enough dorms, we don’t have enough, or maybe it would hurt our brand if we had more people.” But in the post-COVID time, I wonder how persuasive that’s going to be. Because we’re starting to see, you can do online learning. It’s not as good, but it’s not that bad. And maybe with a little bit more time and effort and the technology develops, maybe there are ways to actually admit everybody to this prestigious school that actually kinda deserves it. And maybe that would create a lot more equity in terms of racial justice and in terms of economic justice. And it wouldn’t have to be that expensive, because it would be online, and maybe that’s just an option.
There are all kinds of possibilities. The question is whether these folks are going to take those possibilities. And there may be legitimate reasons not to, but at some point, I think, the test is going to be, “Look, are you really motivated by real limitations, like how many dorms you have? Or are you really motivated by the desire to keep your brand value in a certain way?” And I’m not sure that I can really get behind that. I’m not sure that that’s worthy of accepting when the world has just changed and been turned upside down in all kinds of ways.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. And I think that’s what’s happening with Rabban Gamliel. It looks like his…. Okay, maybe this is why they put that line in there in his mouth. Because his stance is, remember when he talks back to God on his ship in the oven of Achnai story? “Hey, don’t blame me for hurting Rabi Eliezer. I did this only so that there wouldn’t be disputes in Israel, so that we would maintain unity. That’s all I’m about.” And here he’s saying, “I have good reason.” And I think it could be that what this story is bringing out is he’s hiding a kind of fear-driven distrust, control motive behind this apparent, “Oh, I have good intentions, it’s important that every student be a certain kind of student.” I don’t know, there’s something there. I think you’re right.
Dan Libenson: Okay, so let’s jump back into the text and see what happens once they do this, once they remove the guards from the door and remove the admissions requirement. So the next line is, “On that day, several benches were added to the study hall.” And of course, in good Talmudic fashion, there’s now a dispute about how many benches. “Rabbi Yochanan said Aba Yosef ben Dostai and the rabbis disputed this matter. One said 400 benches were added to the study hall, and one said 700 benches were added to the study hall.” Bottom line, a lot of benches were added to the study hall.
Benay Lappe: So a couple things come up for me. One is you can’t see this dispute about was it 400, was it 700, without thinking about the last story we learned, I think, where the carob tree moves across the courtyard, and the only thing they’re disputing is how far did the carob tree move. Was it this many cubits or that many cubits? Nobody disputes that the carob tree miraculously moved. And also, when you’re talking about colleges and access and the era of COVID and online learning, these benches, we’re talking about access here. And all these benches, I don’t know, benches came to mind when you were talking about the possibilities now for greater reach. There’s an unlimited number of benches we can now put in the beit midrash.
Dan Libenson: Right, right. That’s really, that’s fascinating.
The thing that has always struck me about this line, this fact…. You could say, “Hey, we took the guards off the door, we released the admissions requirements, and couple of guys wandered in. There were a couple of people loitering out there.” No, what’s described here is there was a flood of people. I love the idea that you could argue–this goes back to what I’m saying about these college admissions officers. They could argue they didn’t have enough dorm space, but now they basically have unlimited space. So now the question is, “Am I willing to let the people in?” What’s driving me to not let them in, really?
What I really love about this line is that it really strikes me that it resonates with a lot of things that are said in our time Jewishly today, where people say, “They’re not interested in Judaism. The people, they’re disengaged, they’re not interested.” It’s like, no, they’re not interested in it the way you’re insisting it has to be. That is true. So if you’re saying that I insist that it has to be a certain way, then yeah, they’re not interested. But as soon as you say, “Well, maybe it doesn’t have to be the way that I insisted that it’s going to be,” in this case that the insides have to match the outsides, but in another case it could be that you must observe halacha in a certain way, or you must, you can’t be queer to come in, or whatever. As soon as you say, “You know what, that was a mistake, I’m taking that criterion away,” there’s a flood of people in. There’s this pent-up demand that they’re just desperate for a release to be allowed in.
It just seems that that’s not the typical way that demographers and all the people that study the Jewish community, they’re not asking, they’re saying how many times a week do you light Shabbat candles. I guess that’s one. But they’re saying are you lighting Shabbat candles on Shabbat. But what if they ask, “What if we said you didn’t have to light Shabbat candles in order to be a good Jew?” Maybe we would have a huge flood of Jews coming in! That’s a stupid example, but that’s illustrative of the point.
Benay Lappe: Absolutely. This moment so grabs my heart, because what’s not said in the text, but as a person who wasn’t let in, I feel the suffering, I feel what happened to those students before this line. What they were feeling not being able to be let in. And the drama of… what it must have been like for them to finally be let in, and oh my God, now I have access to Torah.
I remember it was a book by Art Waskow, and he said something about we were all at Mount Sinai. And I thought, “Oh my God, we were all at Mount Sinai? We all got the Torah? And this rabbinical school isn’t giving me access to the Torah? Eff them! It’s not theirs. It’s mine! It’s always been mine.” And that’s what these students were feeling, and finally someone is saying, “Yeah, it’s always been yours. Come get it.”
Dan Libenson: When you tell your story about how you, you’ve said, “I went into the closet for five years,” or I don’t know if it was six years, “in order to get the Torah so that I could bring it to other queer folk.” I hear that as a story of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods. And you can think of the story of Prometheus as this clever man who stole fire from the gods, but the real story is why were the gods taking the fire away from the people. What was up with that? And I kind of feel like it’s a tragedy that there has to be a Prometheus. It’s a tragedy that there has to be these kind of rebels who have to go in and steal the plans to the Death Star. I guess in that case….
But I think of it the same way. I feel like I don’t have the same kind of identifiable folk as you. Saying, “There’s queer folk and they’ve been explicitly kept out of Jewish institutions and so I went and stole the Torah to bring to them.” But that was very much my story as well. I felt that I grew up in an environment in a Jewish world, that I didn’t believe in a more religious, traditional, traditionally religious world, and it wasn’t for me. And if that was the only choice that I was being offered, then they would have said, “Oh, not interested.” I thought that about myself! I had a conversation with the rabbi of the school that I went to, the high school that I went to, an Orthodox high school in Israel, and he said to me late in senior year, he was doing exit interviews with all the students, and he said, “I know you’re going to college in America. I hope that you’ll find someone to study with who wants to study as much as you.” Something like that. And I was like, “Haha, that will be easy!” because I didn’t want to study at all. And so I would easily find someone who wanted to study as much as me, which was zero.
But in retrospect, I’m like, yeah, but that’s because the only version that I was presented was this one version! I wasn’t interested in that, but obviously it turns out I’m very interested in the material of Judaism. So I’m not sure exactly how to define my folks. But I kind of feel like I’m trying to be the you for those folks, and say, “This belongs to us.” But there are barriers being put up there that say you’re not a good Jew if you don’t do it our way, but as soon as those barriers come down, there’s actually a huge interest. And then the question is, good, what do you do with that, what does that produce?
Benay Lappe: Let’s acknowledge that it’s scary to someone who loves something that’s this way. These guys had an idea, and in the new Judaism they were creating, it was their little baby. And I think they were afraid. It was such a little seedling, they were afraid to open it up so big because I think they didn’t trust… trust is a very big issue, trust between one generation and the next. And I think when things are changing quickly, the impulse is to only let in the few who think the way you do, when actually the better impulse, which is counter-intuitive for us, is to let the maximum number of people in to take care of this little baby plant.
Dan Libenson: What it’s making me think of is two things, the way you just put it. One is that to remember that, to keep reminding myself–you said it–but to remember that this story is set at the dawn of the new thing. Meaning, it’s not a story about Harvard expanding the size of its class, actually, it’s about the startup competitor to Harvard saying, “How many criteria for admission are we going to have?” And that’s important, because it’s, if you set it up as the new fighting against the old, that’s one kind of setup. But it’s actually–and this goes back to what we were talking about with the oven of Achnai story–that it’s actually a dispute between the new and the new. And it’s an internal dispute.
That’s making me think, too, about–and we’ve talked about this offline, in all kinds of ways, about our own projects. And sometimes for me it’s actually less about do I want to invite in the more radical folks. I totally do. But I think about how far am in interested in inviting in the more traditional folks to my, whether it’s jewishLIVE or Judaism Unbound or whatever project this is that’s about charting that course to the third era. And sometimes my impulse is like, “They’re more interested in the second era.” I feel like I have to be more generous about that, in terms of this story, that it’s not only maybe that when they remove the guards at the door that the radicals come in. Maybe also a bunch more conservatives come in.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, we’re going to see that, right? I think that’s going to happen.
You know, what I said about this being a baby academy–I’m really only thinking this out now. I wonder if this early learning place was more of a sustaining innovation. I’m not sure. But it adopted some of the guards-at-the-door mentality of the old, and hadn’t yet been radically democratized. We see a democratization from hereditary priesthood to any person, but not yet anyone who wants. And I think there’s, maybe it’s speaking to the danger in the early phases of something new that you want to… I’m not sure. I’m not sure. Protect it. Yeah.
Dan Libenson: We’re towards the end of our time, so I want to–I think that I don’t want to just end this on a complete cliffhanger. I want to give one more line, and then understand that we’re going to go back into it next time into more details. We’re going to even backtrack a little bit into things we’ve just discussed, but also we’re going to go forward. But I want to close this on just the note that there is a line that comes just a few lines later–and we’re going to go back, so that we don’t skip the lines in between. But there’s a line that says that on that day, there was no halacha, meaning no dispute, no law, no practice, no question of practice that was pending in the study hall that day that they did not explain. Meaning that the Talmud’s story has as a very central point that it’s hammering that it wasn’t only that they invited in this expanded group. It was that the inviting in of the expanded group let them solve all the problems.
Benay Lappe: That’s right.
Dan Libenson: What would have happened if we hadn’t admitted these people? it’s not just that we wouldn’t have been nice. It’s that maybe we wouldn’t have even had a Judaism. Meaning that everything would still be chaotic. Somehow the inviting in of these people made it work, made it solved.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, that line is, it just gets me. That all of those unresolved dilemmas and issues that had been just hanging–the Hebrew term is just hanging, literally, t’luyah–all of a sudden, because all these people came in, were solved. They were all resolved. The insights of those who were on the margins and seemed unworthy were precisely the things that were, the insights that were necessary to resolve the problem. It’s just stunning. And you’re right, it’s not only to benefit the students, the poor students who couldn’t learn Torah. It was to benefit the tradition who needed them, and they didn’t realize until they let them in. Although the new guard realizes, presumably. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe they didn’t realize what this was going to do, and now all of a sudden they realize, “Oh my God, this is what we needed to understand things that were vexing us.”
Dan Libenson: My impulse is that they didn’t realize, and they learned it through–this is what I think I said a few times–they learned it from the experience, and the reason why we have this story is because they were trying to tell us that that’s what happens. They’re trying to tell us, “Don’t make the same mistake that we did. Let everybody in, because that’s what’s going to get you where you’re trying to go.”
So I think that we’ll pick it up next time. Next week we may have a guest, and we may come back to this second part. We’ll see. And if we don’t come back to the second part next week, we’ll come to it the week after. It gets even more radical. It’s an incredible story, I think it’s so important, and I can’t wait to keep talking about it with you, Benay.
Benay Lappe: Me too. All right. Thanks, Dan, and thanks everybody.
Dan Libenson: See you next time.
Benay Lappe: Okay, bye.
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